Architecture and Civil Engineering: Year In Review 1997

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With many national economies booming, the year 1997 was a good one for architecture in much of the world. It was also a year of increasing internationalism. Several of the most prominent American firms were doing as much as half their work overseas. At the same time, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York City chose 10 finalists to compete for the job of expanding its facilities, 6 of the firms were either European or East Asian. The biggest news, however, was the formal opening of two long-anticipated art museums, one in Los Angeles and the other in Bilbao, Spain. Each was designed by one of the world’s most prominent architects, both winners of the Pritzker Prize. The two buildings seemed to define a watershed between an older and a newer kind of architecture.

The first of the two to be completed, a branch of New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, opened in October in Bilbao. The architect, Frank O. Gehry of the U.S., created an amazing swirling pile of angled and curving free forms with an exterior surface of shining titanium. It was a building that could have been designed or built only with the aid of a computer. Gehry, in fact, had been a pioneer in adapting computer programs from the world of aircraft design. (See Buildings, below.) To many observers his museum seemed to be a masterpiece that might inaugurate a new era in architecture. The museum, the cost of which was paid by the people of Bilbao and its province, was also interesting as a demonstration of the way in which a star architect and attention-getting building could put a relatively little-known city on the world’s cultural map.

Only two months later, in December, the even larger Getty Center opened in Los Angeles. Bringing together, on a single dramatic site, most of the art-related activities funded by the bequest of wealthy oilman J. Paul Getty, it was undoubtedly the most discussed and anticipated building of its time. With a $1 billion construction budget, it was often called the architectural commission of the century. The architect was Richard Meier, also an American, who had long been known for houses in an elegant, austere Modernist style and for museums in Barcelona, Spain; Frankfurt, Ger.; and Atlanta, Ga. In some ways Meier’s museum seemed as much a culmination of traditional modernism as Gehry’s seemed a new departure. Its crisply cut white shapes reminded observers of the early modern architecture of the French pioneer Le Corbusier. Dispersed among gardens, courtyards, and water features, the Getty buildings also reminded one of a much older model, the villa built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian outside Rome.

The Pritzker Prize, often called the architectural equivalent of a Nobel, was won in 1997 by Sverre Fehn of Norway , something of a dark horse who was not widely known internationally. Most of his major works were in Scandinavia, including the Glacier Museum in Norway and an extension of the National Theatre in Copenhagen. The Pritzker jury commended Fehn for successfully combining modern architectural form with elements of his Norwegian heritage. Fehn was awarded the prize at a ceremony in May at the site of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

Tadao Ando of Japan received the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Best known for his exquisite handling of natural light in chapels in Japan--built, usually, entirely out of smooth concrete--Ando was also named winner of a competition for the design of a new museum of modern art in Fort Worth, Texas, his first U.S. commission. This museum was to be built directly across the street from Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, one of the most celebrated of 20th-century buildings.

The Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects was not awarded in 1997. The AIA, however, named 13 U.S. buildings as winners of its annual Honor Awards for architecture. Among the most prominent were a renovation of historic Memorial Hall at Harvard University by Venturi, Scott Brown, with Bruner/Cott and Robert Neiley; the Bass Center for Molecular and Structural Biology at Yale University by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood; and the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, Calif., by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. The National Library of France in Paris, by Dominique Perrault, won the Mies van der Rohe award for European buildings "of conceptual and technical merit." The extensive use of glass in the building had outraged bibliophiles because exposure to sunlight makes the preservation of materials problematic.

Civic Buildings

Memorials of various kinds were in the news in the U.S. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial opened to the public on a site fronting the Potomac River Basin in Washington, D.C. Designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, it comprised a series of outdoor pools and courtyards with walls of dark basalt stone, on which were engraved quotations and images drawn from the president’s four terms in office. As a result of pressure from various interest groups, it was decided not to show Roosevelt with his signature cigarette holder or his wife, Eleanor, in a fur boa. Congress also mandated that the designer add some reference to the fact that the president used a wheelchair.

Opening to general acclaim was the Women in Military Service to America Memorial at the foot of Arlington (Va.) National Cemetery. Designers Marian Weiss and Michael Manfredi carved out new space behind the 1939 semicircular landscape wall by McKim Mead & White, which was also restored as part of the project. The controversial World War II Memorial, planned for a site on the Mall near the Washington Monument, was being revised by Friedrich St. Florian after criticism that his winning design, for a large paved plaza and water feature, might be so intrusive as to interfere with views from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.

Also new in Washington was the long-awaited passenger terminal at National Airport by Cesar Pelli. The main concourse was a huge ceremonial space, with a vaulted roof and tall windows overlooking the Potomac River. Washington’s other airport, Dulles International, designed by the late Eero Saarinen and regarded as an architectural masterpiece, was doubled in size by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in a manner that seemed only to enhance its power. In Portland, Ore., a new federal courthouse by Kohn Pedersen Fox was an outstanding example of recent efforts by the U.S. government to improve the architecture of public buildings. In Madison, Wis., the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, based on a design made more than 50 years earlier by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, opened on a lakefront site in July.

Cultural Buildings

At the year’s end it appeared that the long-stalled Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles by Gehry would be built. In September it was announced that 83% of its $220 million cost was in hand and that the hall was expected to be completed early in 2001.

In January the Museum of Modern Art in New York City announced that 10 architects had been chosen to make competing proposals for the museum’s expansion. The museum avoided many famous names in search of a younger architect. In the spring the 10 proposals went on exhibit in the museum, and in December it was announced that Yoshio Taniguchi of Japan was the winner. Another of the 10 competitors, Stephen Holl of New York City, meanwhile won considerable praise for his Chapel of St. Ignatius at Seattle (Wash.) University.

In Singapore a vast 30-ha (75-ac) technical college, Temasek Polytechnic, was the last building by the late British architect James Stirling, designed with his partner Michael Wilford. In Santa Fe, N.M., a museum for the work of painter Georgia O’Keeffe opened in a former adobe church, renovated and expanded by New York architect Richard Gluckman.

Commercial Buildings

Gehry garnered attention with an office building in Prague known as "Fred and Ginger," named for the dancing pair of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Its two towers seemed to be locked in a ballroom dance. The RWE AG Hochhaus in Essen, Ger., was seen as the first of a new generation of energy-saving, environmentally responsible office towers, reflecting the great interest in such "green" architecture in Europe. The 30-story tower was cylindrical with small floor areas that allowed maximum daylight for all offices. Exterior walls sandwiched aluminum blinds between two layers of glass. The Commerzbank building in Frankfurt by Norman Foster of Britain was another "green" tower completed in 1997. (See Buildings, below.)

In Culver City, Calif., architect Eric Moss added two buildings to what had become virtually a town of some 20 commercial structures he had done in a highly personal style. The buildings often looked more like elaborate sculptures than conventional architecture.

Exhibitions

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City staged the largest exhibit ever held of the work of the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Originating in Glasgow, Scot., the exhibit later traveled to Chicago and Los Angeles. It focused on 250 items, including furniture, watercolours, posters, and other objects by the noted architect, one of the founders of the Art Nouveau style at the turn of the century. At the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, American pop-culture scholar Karal Ann Marling curated an exhibit on the work of the theme-park architecture of the Disney Co. entitled "The Architecture of Reassurance." Mounted at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Ger., was a major exhibit of the work of American designers Charles and Ray Eames, creators of the "Eames chair" and many other classics of graphic and industrial design.

News Events

Aldo Rossi, one of the most influential architects of his generation, died in Italy in September. Winner of the 1990 Pritzker Prize, Rossi was known for his belief that one purpose of architecture is to embody the memory of a people and a culture and to provide a setting for ritual and everyday drama. His own buildings often seemed to possess a dreamlike familiarity. Paul Rudolph died in August in New York City of cancer that was thought to date back to his days of working with asbestos in a naval shipyard during World War II. He was best known for a series of monumentally rugged concrete buildings of the 1960s, including the Art and Architecture Building at Yale University. (See OBITUARIES.) William Turnbull, much admired as a practitioner of a woody, landscape-sensitive, modest architecture and a collaborator, with Charles Moore and others, on the landmark Sea Ranch condominiums of 1966, died in June.

A political controversy erupted in California over a referendum proposal to award state architectural contracts on the basis purely of low cost rather than quality of the architectural design. It was strongly opposed by architects. Near Chicago the legendary Farnsworth House (1946-50), designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and regarded as one of the great private houses of the Modern movement, was opened for public tours for the first time.

Urban Design

With the runaway commercial success of the Disney new town of Celebration in Florida, the movement known as the New Urbanism continued to gain in strength and popularity. New Urbanists believed in traditional tightly knit, walkable towns rather than the more sprawling, car-oriented suburban developments of recent decades. As the year ended, many New Urbanist communities, sometimes called "neotraditional," were on the drawing boards. Among the largest was Cornell near Toronto, designed to contain 10,000 homes plus a shopping main street and office space. Designed by the Miami, Fla., team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk , leaders of the New Urbanism movement, Cornell began selling its first 700 houses in June. The town plan was described by Duany as his firm’s "absolutely flawless, best, flagship project." Supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, New Urbanist principles were also beginning to be applied to the renovation of older housing projects in and near the centres of American cities.

Another trend worldwide was the growth of "entertainment retail," in which firms such as Nike, Disney, and Time Warner created stores that were as much theme parks as sales outlets. Their purpose was to advertise their products in key locations.

Controversy surrounded major public spaces in three U.S. cities in 1997. In San Francisco a competition was held in August for the redesign of neglected Union Square, a plaza above an underground garage at the heart of downtown. The winning entry, which the designers described as "one plane that wraps itself over the garage like a piece of origami," was thought too avant-garde by some, and its future was uncertain. In Philadelphia the long-running controversy over Independence Mall, where 500 historic buildings were demolished in the 1960s to create a little-used park, continued. The new proposal, by the National Park Service with landscape architect Laurie Olin, would shrink the park by adding new buildings, including a new shelter for the Liberty Bell. In Boston proposals to shrink and enliven another barren civic space, City Hall Plaza, by adding a new hotel along one edge ran into opposition from the U.S. government on the grounds that the hotel would obstruct views of government workers in a federal building.

More successful was the ongoing revival of Times Square in New York City, where several deteriorating theatres were restored, two of them into a new Ford Center for the Performing Arts. Plans were also announced for a 16-screen movie theatre complex and for a design by Gehry to wrap the former Times Tower in a "striptease" fabric of see-through mesh and a jazzy new 47-story hotel complex by the Miami design firm Arquitectonica.

Bridges

Repairs, renovations, and rehabilitations gained prominence in 1997 as bridges throughout the world revealed the need to be strengthened for 21st-century traffic loads and to be upgraded to meet new earthquake-resistant design standards. In regard to the latter, five crossings of the bay area around San Francisco required major upgrades. Some work was under way on the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge, though funding was still required for the main towers, the main span, and the Fort Point arch. Design and initial construction upgrading work was also under way on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, which needed huge new foundations and strengthened steel work. Most problematic was the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which needed about $1.5 billion worth of work. The suspension section was to be upgraded to withstand seismic shocks better, but costs for upgrading the viaduct were so high that a $1 billion replacement was to be built. A variety of designs were proposed, including exotic tilting cable-stays and a single-pylon suspension span, though none would be built until after 2000. (For notable civil engineering projects, see below.)

On a positive note, 1997 witnessed the resurgence of the suspension bridge, the most suitable design for the longest spans. In Hong Kong the outgoing British administration celebrated the opening in April of the 1,377-m-long central span of the Tsing Ma suspension bridge with fireworks and a speech from Baroness Thatcher (1 m = 3.28 ft). Though second in length to Britain’s 1,410-m Humber Bridge, Tsing Ma was the sturdiest of the long suspension bridges, carrying not just a dual three-lane highway to the airport but also a high-speed railway inside its steel deck box. The bridge also had to withstand typhoon-force winds.

Humber’s length record would not last much longer. During the year the last deck sections were lifted into place for the 1,624-m central span Great Belt (Store Bælt) East Bridge in Denmark, part of an extended crossing between the islands of Zealand and Funen. The bridge carried a dual two-lane highway.

When completed in 1998, Great Belt East would not hold the world length record for long. In Japan the 1,991-m-long Akashi Kaikyo suspension bridge was nearing the end of its 10-year construction program; it would form the major element of a second crossing to Shikoku Island from Honshu, Japan’s main island.

China was pressing ahead with plans for a 28-km (17.4-mi) crossing of the Pearl River Delta to Hong Kong, mainly on a viaduct though including a 1,400-m span, a 900-m span, and a 250-m span. In Bangladesh the 9-km (5.6-mi) Bangabandhu Bridge (until August 28 the Jamuna Multipurpose Bridge) was taking shape; it would cross treacherous and deep soft silts and a riverbed that shifted alignment every year. Huge steel piles up to 100 m long and 7 m in diameter supported the piers for the 99-m-long precast concrete deck spans that were being placed one every 12 days.

Finally, a small cable-stayed bridge completed during the year in Kolding, Den., may have been a portent of the future. Just 40 m long, it could support a five-ton tractor load easily, but the deck weighed only two tons because it was made of reinforced polyester. A normal concrete deck would weigh 30 tons. According to some industry observers, plastic and carbon-fibre bridges might eventually exceed those of steel by a factor of two in length.Adrian Lee Greeman

BUILDINGS

Architects had long dreamed that exterior walls of buildings would protect yet breathe--like human skin. That dream came one step closer to reality in 1997 with the completion of two office towers. The "skin" of the headquarters for RWE AG in Essen, Ger. (Ingenhoven, Overdiek, Kahlen & Partners, architect, Düsseldorf), consisted of two layers sandwiching a 50-cm-wide air space (1 cm = 0.39 in). The outer layer of glass incorporated ventilating slots; an inner glass layer slid open as needed. With the outer ventilating slots closed, the air space acted as an insulating layer. When the slots were open, the air space became a cooling chimney; hot, stale air rose and was exhausted, and cooler fresh air was drawn in. The extensive glass usually eliminated the need for daytime electric lights (automated blinds set between the glass layers offered protection from solar heat and glare). The building’s exposed concrete slab absorbed heat generated during the day, reradiating it at night for winter heating or summer precooling. These design elements reduced RWE’s energy use to well below Germany’s strict requirements. At the same time, users had a great deal of discretion in the control of temperature, ventilation, and light.

While many of the same techniques were used by the London-based firm of Sir Norman Foster & Partners in the design of the Commerzbank tower, completed in Frankfurt, Ger., that project took natural ventilation one step farther. Excess heat rose within the full-height open internal shaft, and fresh air was drawn inward through four-story gardens carved into the exterior. Another benefit was that inside offices, which could legally be windowless in some countries but not in Germany, opened onto the gardens.

The Getty Center in Los Angeles opened in December after 14 years of design and construction. At 87,790 sq m (945,000 sq ft), it was among the largest cultural complexes ever constructed at one time. Among its innovations was a louver and skylight system that precisely limited the amount of natural light falling on sensitive paintings.

Several large Asian airports were under construction during the year. The first 516,000-sq m (5,554,000-sq ft) terminal area at Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong (Sir Norman Foster & Partners, architect; Ove Arup & Partners, engineer) was roofed in huge 36 × 36-m vaults supported by a steel lattice set at a diagonal (36 m = 118 ft). Seoul, S.Kor.’s vast international airport was divided into a "land side" of ticketing, baggage, and ground-transportation functions linked by an underground automated people mover to several linear "air-side" terminals for boarding and deplaning (Fentress Bradburn, Denver, Colo., with the Korean Architects Collaborative International). Kisho Kurokawa (Japan) designed satellite terminals for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s airport that evoked the tropical environment, using tree-form column-trunks that supported inverted double-curved roofs ("branches").

Highly sophisticated computer-modeling software enabled the design of buildings of unprecedented sculptural complexity. Chief among them was the Guggenheim Museum that opened in Bilbao, Spain. CATIA, the computer software used by architect Frank O. Gehry (Santa Monica, Calif.) not only helped realize the museum’s sinuous titanium-clad vaults and flowerlike forms; it also analyzed the supporting steel structure, conveying to the fabricator the loads and geometries of the connections and thereby greatly reducing the time needed to calculate their proper strength.